Website URLs are long and difficult to remember. SnipURL allows you to ‘snip’ your long URLs into small, friendly and persistent links for sharing and remembering. Free!

Following are some features of SnipURL —

1. SHORTEN LONG, DIFFICULT-TO-REMEMBER URLs
Website URLs are getting longer and cumbersome. Not only are they difficult to remember, it is also a pain sending them in emails because they wrap on to more than one line and become un-clickable! SnipURL is a fast and free service that allows you to “snip” your long URLs into small, compact links for sharing in emails and remembering easily.

Consider a web URL like the following (It is a real website, go ahead and click it if you wish) —

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003CXZ3/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/
103\538622451046/oihjgjhgfjkfhgfhg/867785/%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/1oihjgjhgfjkfhgf
hg/867785/obidos/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/103-3538622451046252bTQRc5bB8Zoqtl
OeDdZwlJtHLgfMIVHUWlmPWw8uDAvn6M%252bkyj2OhU7lZS%252fzgR6gc6Gc6UR0nFUKiK
Z%252fUA1FA7i4GoxVbNUmI3sVoXmLsVCjdi1tcAxjLEEXFdAvuJU%252bwjYfFeWO15n%25
2fiFsgXNxKDxWULBFtyxoa65AuWb0a5SU%252ftWdT4P7e8CtC9acf37axZa%252fI2MWC7g54T
PL6YB%252bwcKdZuh60N%252fb83BrfUSLSD/5F7/103\538622451046 (513 characters)

After “snipping” the same above URL looks like this —

http://snipurl.com/d (20 characters)
http://snipurl.com/memento (26 characters)

or

http://snurl.com/d (18 characters)
http://snurl.com/memento (24 characters)

SnURL and SnipURL are the same domain. Note that these four URLs are small so you can send them in emails without the fear of them wrapping, meaningful so you can remember and share them in the future, and permanent so if your underlying URL expires or changes you can always modify your snipped URL. (Asa bonus, you can even see the popularity of you URLs by viewing how many people clicked on it). Snipping is easy. You can set up a shortcut (bookmarklet) on your browser and you’re ready to go.

2. IN FIVE LANGUAGES (and more coming soon!)
The website can be viewed in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and French. We are also working on text-only versions in each of these languages so that makes it 10 types of websites as we write this. Among these languages, we cover at least around 80% of the world if not more.

3. MORE INTUITIVE URLs WITH NICKNAMES
Don’t like URLs like http://snipurl.com/h because they are just some random text? Then you can make http://snipurl.com/digicam_review and post more intuitive URLs to your mailing lists or in your newsletters with sophisticated user tracking etc.

4. PROTECTED SNIPPED URLs (PRIVATE)
Worried that people can basically guess http://snipurl.com/1 or http://snipurl.com/2 or http://snipurl.com/<some sequence here>? But want to have a URL that you wish to track BUT only with users you send the URL to? Then you can “protect” your snippings with a keycode. SO instead of a URL such as http://snipurl.com/i, it will become http://snipurl.com/i-secret where “secret” was your password. Private “snippings” are excluded from our statistics or search of course.

5. INTUITIVE STATISTICS & SEARCH IN “MYSNIPURL”
A quick registration process gives you access to all the URLs you have snipped in one screen, along with click-through statistics. You can also search for the URLs you have snipped by entering keywords that were contained in the original link or the nicknames you gave to your snipped URLs. Apart from your own URLs, we also have some popular statistics under the EVERYTHING ELSE section, which includes for instance the Most Popular Snippings.

6. EDIT SNIPPINGS!
If your underlying link has expired or is deadlink, you can always edit your snipping from the MYSNIPURL page. (None of the comparable websites that we are aware of offer a possibility to edit your snippings).

7. SHORTCUT
A spiffy shortcut allows you to add a “bookmarklet” to your browser and “snip” URLs quickly (for people who do not understand bookmarklets, we have a little visual help: http://snipurl.com/SnipThis.htm which is a flash animation and opens in a new window or a more detailed FAQ). After the shortcut is installed on your browser bar, snipping is as easy as this:

                    Demo of a typical SnipURL screen

• Copy to clipboard quickly (pop up window closes automatically after you copy the snipped URL in your clipboard)
• Share the snipped URL right from this website
• Compose new mails (using your default email client) …the snipped URL is automatically inserted

8. A PUBLIC STATISTICS PAGE WITH FLOOD CONTROL
A public statistics page (http://snipurl.com/else.php) allows you to see the most popular snippings. A “flood control” mechanism is implemented in this webpage so that unfairly “bumped” accesses to URLs are carefully chaffed out. And of course, users can search these too. “PROTECTED” URLs are not included in this public view of course.

9. REAL REDIRECTS
SnipURL will also let you do “deep snipping”. So if your snipped website is “http://snipurl.com/e” (which points to the website “http://www.copyright.gov”) and you have directories and files below that level, you can access them using “http://snipurl.com/e/carp/index.html” which is actually http://www.copyright.gov/carp/index.html.

10. SPAM CONTROL
If a snipped redirection is suspected unfair use of our services and is in violation of our Terms of Use, we reserve the right to suspend the snipping. An example is http://snipurl.com/th.

11. VISUAL INDICATION OF URL TYPES
When in the statistics webpage, a visual icon indicates what the nature of the underlying URL is. E.g., http://snipurl.com/else.php, so that you can decide before you unwittingly click on an executable or a PDF file for instance.


12. PERMANANT SNIPPINGS!
Your snipped or shortened URLs will be left as they are (you can always edit them too, of course). Snipped URLs never die, they just get spam protected, if anything.

13. TEXT-ONLY VERSION FOR DIAL-UP USERS, OR FOR MINIMALISTS IN GENERAL
If you find graphics obstructing your work (although they make the information more visually intuitive, so we would recommend using this version if possible), then you can use our toned-down text version as well. Read more about this in our FAQ.

English text-only version | Japanese text-only version | French text-only version

14. A PERL API
SnipURL now exists as a Perl API for those who are interested! Click here to go get the module at CPAN. (Thanks to Taguchi-san of Cisco for letting us know about this)

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Akademie.de’s feature analysis of SnipURL in German

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